Yeats on Tagore Yields to Thoughts on van Gogh

W.B. Yeats was a fan of Tagore's Gitanjali and wrote an introduction to an English edition of that book of poems. Here, in part, is what he had to say:

We had not known that we loved God, hardly it may be that we believed in Him; yet looking backward upon our life we discover, in our exploration of the pathways of woods, in our delight in the lonely places of hills, in that mysterious claim that we have made, unavailingly on the woman that we have loved, the emotion that created this insidious sweetness. "Entering my heart unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king, thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting moment." This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the scourge; being but a lifting up, as it were, into a greater intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the sunlight, and we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to William Blake who have seemed so alien to our violent history.

Had Yeats only known Hafiz and Rumi!

Perhaps the "mood of the painter" as a holy mood is best represented by Vincent van Gogh's attempt to paint the sublimated ecstasies of the everyday:

Van Gogh, The Red Vineyard at Arles.

As Theo van Gogh wrote to a correspondent about his brother in 1889:

"That head of his has been occupied with contemporary society's insoluble problems for so long, and he is still battling on with his good-heartedness and boundless energy. His efforts have not been in vain, but he will probably not live to see them come to fruition, for by the time people understand what he is saying in his paintings it will be too late. He is one of the most advanced painters and it is difficult to understand him, even for me who knows him so intimately. His ideas cover so much ground, examining what is humane and how one should look at the world, that one must first free oneself from anything remotely linked to convention to understand what he was trying to say, but I am sure he will be understood later on. It is just hard to say when."

The Mazeppist wonders if that day of comprehension has yet to arrive--or even if it is too much to hope that it will ever dawn.